


the sun rises

by itsrosencrantz



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: During Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:34:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28540395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsrosencrantz/pseuds/itsrosencrantz
Summary: Claude and some of the Golden Deer during the timeskip.Written for Nagamas 2020.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 16
Collections: Nagamas Gifts





	the sun rises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [queenlua](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenlua/gifts).



> A gift fic for my first year participating in Nagamas! I had a lot of fun with this prompt, and only wish I'd had the time to do more - I hope you enjoy your gift! It was fun to do a timeskip piece from Claude's point of view.

The dust does not so much settle on the monastery as the time for retreat comes upon them. Edelgard's unexpected strike catches them all unaware, and losses are heavy on both sides; with the Archbishop and Professor Byleth vanished, demonic beasts gouging the earth, and foot soldiers falling on one another's blades, it becomes clear that this is a battle that will not be won, but will be survived.

Every battle has a pulse, and with each thrum of this one, blood splashes over the grass and soaks into the earth. Avenues for escape fall away in time with the heartbeat, growing sluggish and exhausted. Though he has never liked to play the part of a coward, Claude has never seen the nobility in dying for pride over living for a cause, and so it costs him little to raise his fist and shout across the field:

"Withdraw! If you're able, run!" Heads jerk toward him, bursts of magic lighting the burnt orange of the horizon as the battle continues, a knot of bodies and weapons writhing against each other. "Do _not_ die here if you can live to fight again tomorrow!"

There is no doubt in his mind that, if given the opportunity, Edelgard will crush them here. She's always been a bit of a mystery to him, compelling and exasperating in turn because of it; Claude likes to be the one holding all the pieces to the puzzle, and Edelgard has never allowed it. In the early days, he'd likened her to one of the old puzzle boxes his father favored, intricately carved and beautiful for it, but frustrating to the extreme if you didn't have the patience to find the proper sequence. Now, with ruin around them and her ambition obscured in more blood than clarity, he realizes his misstep: she was never the puzzle box. She was always the one holding it.

They fall back in waves, staggered and defending their own backs, but the massacre was on both sides, and so they walk. Claude realizes, throwing only a small leather pouch into his saddle sack and mounting a wyvern for his escape, that as much as he had underestimated Edelgard, the same could be said for Dimitri. They'd fought shoulder-to-shoulder and for where Edeldgard's hands were ice, stretching across the world in a slow, steady march, Dimitri was fire: consuming, reckless with his anger and his betrayal. Between the two extremes is only one commonality, and even as Claude takes to the sky with a bow in hands, laying down fire to cover his retreating allies, he knows he will have to be the earth and, like the earth, endure both the fire and the ice.

They abandon the monastery, the Church, and the Professor, and though only one of them feels like a true loss in the moment, the consequences of all ripple across the next half decade.

*

The sort of kinship that grew among the Golden Deer was extraordinary for its unlikeness. After the fall of Garreg Mach, they spread across their third of Fódlan like a net, scattering to where they were all needed most - and in most cases, bound by nothing to one another. Claude does not see the likes of Leonie, Ignatz, Marianne or Raphael at all, and he doesn't have the time to write them. Even those who have turned their hands and minds to government he only meets with sparingly, usually only keeping touch by messenger - for as terse and brief as her letters are, the information Lysithea passes along to him is indispensable - but that is the way of it during war. The Duke dies and Claude steps into his role, clever hands moving over the strings of the instrument the Alliance of Leicester has become, and he makes friends of his old enemies and enemies of his old friends, depending on who is standing before him at the time and what they need to hear in order to maintain the precarious balance that, some days, he feels is keeping the entire continent of Fódlan from descending into chaos.

Edelgard is relentless and inescapable. Facing her headlong is not an option, and neither is supporting Faerghus after a coup, so Claude does what he does best: he juggles. 

Through Gloucester and Ordelia against Goneril and Riegan, the Alliance walks a tightrope with the Empire, careful to keep Adrestia's eye focused on Faerghus by giving the impression that though the chaos of Leicester's infighting, that is the greatest threat to Edelgard's war. At the seam of mountains separating countries, the suspiciously-quiet Almyra is kept at bay by the Alliance's finest general - and it does seem that the border only begins to flare up when cool violet eyes turn a little too intently toward that part of the country. Edelgard is too wise to take on a war split on two fronts, and so Claude is careful to ensure that the Alliance appears to have its hands full cannibalizing itself and fending off the opportunistic country to the East.

 _Leicester will be a simple victory_ , he promises without ever speaking a word; _look how we fight amongst ourselves. Look how we keep Almyra at bay, but barely. When you finish with Faerghus, we'll be simple to pick off._

At the Roundtable, he never raises his voice, but other lords do for him: he is battered and buoyed in turn, praised and censured for everything from being too young to know his own mind and too stubborn to deviate from it. While work is done there on the surface, it is in moments after that the _real_ work of the war is accomplished. It is catching Hilda's eye and excusing himself from General Holst and Margrave Edmund's conversation so that she can whisper troop movements in his ear under the guise of flirting, in Lorenz's impeccable footwork while they dance with different partners and a barbed comment is lobbed at him mid-number about _strolling in the gardens_ rather than tending to the Alliance.

The real work is done under an archway wound with flowers, tension in the downturn of Lorenz's mouth as he presses wrapped correspondence into Claude's hands and reminds him how very much is at stake.

"See that you don't misstep," Lorenz says in a tight, clipped tone, moonlight sharpening the angles of his face. "There is too much at stake."

"Didn't you see me out there? I maneuver better all the time," Claude tosses back with a smile that barely leaves his lips, the letters immediately secreted away in the folds of his formal wear. "Dance with me sometime and maybe I'll impress you."

Music swells behind them, a terrible sort of beauty to behold in the midst of a war, and Lorenz says, "For all our sake, I hope you do."

*

Part of leading, Claude knows, is utilizing every resource available. He has never led during a war before but it would be a lie to say that he didn't imagine it; going to Fódlan had been eye-opening in many ways. He'd heard all of his mothers stories about the land she came from - sparing though they were - and he knows that few things were more powerful than ignorance and misinformation hand-in-hand. He'd seen both at work in Almyra regarding his Fódlan heritage, and he'd seen the same in Fódlan while hiding his Almyran heritage. In many ways, the two places were so much the same that he catches himself wondering at times, while the wick burns down on his candles and the maps beneath his hands blur, if he will go back to the land he was born in and be homesick for the one most people expect him to die in.

That doesn't bother him much - most things don't - because many people have expected him to die in his short life, and they have all been disappointed. He's very good at that, at the end of the day - disappointing expectations. 

No one would think to look for the leader of the alliance in a banged up, dirty little tavern tucked into Gloucester territory, but he's there all the same. He knows enough not to wear anything that sparkles or betrays his status, but no one really looks twice at him anyway; he's sure they see enough soldiers passing through that as long as he doesn't jump up on the table and start singing and dancing, his visit will end up as unremarkable as anyone else's. The red-headed woman who drops down opposite him, however, draws more than once glance that lingers.

He smiles at her, sliding a mug of ale to the center of the table. "Long time no see, Leonie. Thanks for meeting up with me."

"Thanks for the beer," she returns easily, already raising her hand to signal for another as she brings it up and tosses half of it back. She looks good - better than most right now - and he knows that, at least with Leonie, it isn't affected. She's straightforward and blunt by nature rather than design, refreshing in a way that Claude's had little of since... he can remember, really. "You don't mind if I put another on your tab, right?"

He shakes his head, drawing out his vowel and popping the p. "Nope. Or at least, I don't mind enough to arm wrestle you about it." 

They banter for a little while, empties piling up between them, more on Leonie's side than Claude's. He hasn't drank enough to be inebriated in a long time, and he doesn't quite get there now, but he skirts close. It's easy to, knowing that her people are both in the tavern and around it, and that he has nothing to worry about from her. A wiser man might be suspicious of even an old classmate, and there's a possibility that Leonie could be bought out by a higher bidder than he is, true, because that's the nature of a mercenary's work, but he likes to think he knows her too well for that. She's another one who plays the long game, albeit a different one from Claude; she won't burn the bridge beneath their feet without a very good reason.

Information changes hands along with a letter, sealed with wax and addressed to someone who, at the moment, is publicly not speaking to him. Leonie promises to get it where it needs to go, and she even offers to escort him back to his horse, an arm thrown over his shoulders and a smile in place.

"Worried about me wandering around alone in the dark?" He asks, swaying with her to mask exactly _who_ is holding up _who_.

She snorts, reaching up to slap an open palm against his chest. "Worried about you wandering off in the dark with my paycheck, more like."

His laughter spirals up into the night sky and breaks free, fading into black.

*

Marianne finds him, not the other way around.

More appropriately: Marianne tends him, her lips pressed so tight he imagines them bloodless, and he knows that at some point, he tries to say something comforting, but judging by the stricken look when he tries to talk, it doesn't go over well. He fades in and out of consciousness, sometimes waking to hear her speaking lowly to someone in the room, sometimes only to silence and the feeling of small, cold hands on his forehead. It reminds him of when he was a child and sweating out a fever; his hair is pushed back, ice pressed to fire, and as much as it hurts, it feels good, too.

When he's slept enough to be lucid, he almost laughs at the idea that it wasn't poison or even a particularly grievous wound that almost did him in, but rather, infection. He learns from Marianne that she's kept her head down and tried to stay out of things, in the halting, hesitant sort of way he's used to her speaking, but he'd been brought back to the Margrave's own home to recover.

"Thanks," Claude tells her, eyes steady on her profile. Her hair is pulled back from her face like he remembers, eyes downcast while her hands flutter around the tea service, her nerves escaping her with the quick, short bursts of movement. "For healing me. How long was I out?"

There are a thousand things he was intending to do once he got to Derdriu, and now there are a thousand more that will need to be done for damage control. He thinks of Leonie, and he thinks of a letter, wondering if it was sent.

Marianne's soft voice brings him back to the present. "Oh, um, only a couple of days. I'm sorry; I've done the best I can. I'm not as good as someone else might be at healing, but you'll make a full recovery. Your wyvern is stabled here, and I wrote to my adoptive father so everyone knows you're... alive. I don't think... um, no one really knows you've been bedridden, I think."

Relief trickles through him. "No, there's no one I'd rather have patching me up. I mean that."

He takes a look at her, a _good_ look, and notes how dark the smudges beneath her eyes are, the drag of her shoulders. What he mistook for anxiousness could easily be overcompensation for fatigue, he realizes, and shame twines with relief, potent.

Marianne offers him a wide-eyed look, and then her gaze darts away. "There's also... Count Gloucester has been insistent. He's sent someone to meet with you, since you didn't meet everyone at Derdriu. They'll be here soon. Maybe today?"

"I never thought I'd say this," Claude begins, already throwing the blanket off his legs, "but I really hope it's Lorenz."

It startles a laugh out of her, which is what he wants.

"And as much as I'd like to see him twist himself into unimaginable offense if I did, I probably shouldn't greet him in my nightclothes. How much blood's on my riding wear? Be honest..."

*

He expects someone from Gloucester, but what he gets instead is Hilda.

She ushers Marianne out and closes the door behind her, palms pressed flat against the wood panels and a mutinous pout on her face. Beneath the facade, he can see real worry, and he wonders if Holst knows she's here or not. Many things pass unsaid between them in a glance, and when he doesn't immediately volunteer any information, she sighs theatrically, her entire body slumping back against the door. 

"Claude, you really scared me! When you didn't show up to the Roundtable meeting it was a big deal, and Lorenz's mean old dad was ready to call a special session and declare you dead right there." She pushes off, stalking across the room to where he is, and tucks her arms tight beneath her bust. "I thought Holst was going to flip the table over on him."

Sidestepping her scold, he asks, "How'd you get here so fast? Did you fly?" and at her baleful look, he scratches the back of his neck. "Sorry. Didn't mean to worry anyone. I was on my way, I just got a little sidetracked. Marianne patched me right up, though. Did everyone disperse?"

"No, since she wrote and let us all know you were _fine_ , they're waiting. I'm supposed to bring you back." Her nose wrinkles, and her eyes are hard. "You _are_ fine, right?"

He lifts a hand and crosses it over his heart. "Not even a little dead. Honest. I know I've looked better, but you can't hold that against me, since you _did_ barge in on me in the guest room."

Hilda rolls her eyes with a huff, but some of the tension has left her face, softening it. "Whatever. If you scare me like that again..."

He holds his hands up, turning and walking backward to the door as he does. "Message received, loud and clear. Let's go before they send someone else after you and we're both in trouble..."

*

It's damage control at best, and he pulls it off, but barely. Count Gloucester's expression grows more severe with every word tumbling out of Claude's mouth, his eyes never wavering as Claude walks around the table and speaks with his hands, wide gestures with plenty of movement. _Nothing's amiss here_ , he projects, knowing that the slightest wince or stagger will be lit up like the afterimage of a lightning spell with so many pairs of eyes boring into him. _Just caught up in a little tussle, but it's all good now_.

They address border skirmishes among their own people and the pressure of Edelgard's presence bearing down on them all. Myrddin is brought up, fought over, dismissed again; that will be a sticking point in the very near future, Claude knows, but not yet. 

One crisis at a time.

He exits the chamber and even though he knows its coming, the hand that curls around his elbow and pulls him around a corner and through a doorway comes quicker than he expected. Lorenz's jaw is set and his eyes are forward while they walk, even after Claude shrugs his arm out of his grasp and keeps pace with his lengthy stride. It's unsurprising that they find themselves in a garden again, and Claude has barely opened his mouth to speak when Lorenz breaks the silence.

"You had a letter sent to me."

Trusty, reliable Leonie.

Claude inclines his head. "Did you read it?"

From inside the breast of his jacket, Lorenz withdraws the letter. From here, Claude can see the wax seal with the Riegan crest unbroken, but he knows that makes no difference; from the look on Lorenz's face, he knows precisely what it is, and he's furious. It's an interesting turn of events, given all that they've been through together since they met. Once upon a time, he thinks that Lorenz would have leapt at the opportunity to have the sort of tangible evidence that may or may not be contained in that letter. At the very least, the opportunity to lord leverage over Claude would have been a temptation that few could resist, and yet here they are: standing before one another, a sealed letter held aloft between them.

Lorenz's mouth barely moves around the words. "Of course not. It's your succession orders, I imagine."

They're pressed into Claude's chest, held in place only by Lorenz's fingertips. 

Lorenz leans in, and his breath mists between them as he speaks. "Entrusted to me. Why?"

Claude doesn't blink. "Entrusted to Leonie, if you want to be pedantic about it. Which, in my experience, you do, but-"

" _Claude_." Claude quiets. "Putting this in my hands is a dangerous, reckless move, even for you. You know what I could do with this knowledge."

 _What my father would have me do_ suspends between them, buried in the quiet of Lorenz's urgent tone. 

"I do." Claude waits a beat, and then brings his hand up, circling Lorenz's wrist. He presses his fingers to the skin just below his thumb, and imagines he can feel the pulse there, beating steadily. "I also know what you _will_ do with it. You want what's best for the Alliance, and you won't do anything to put my life in jeopardy right now."

"Arrogant," Lorenz breathes.

He smiles. "Maybe. Hold onto it anyway. Just in case."

*

Five years passes slowly and in the blink of an eye. Though he has little hope that he'll find anything but memories among the halls of Garreg Mach, Claude returns there under the bright promise of a new dawn.

The sun rises.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on twitter at itsrosencrantz!


End file.
